Majority Leader Harry Reid is expected to file cloture tonight on financial reform setting up a Wednesday vote on whether to end debate on the bill and bring it to a final vote. The final vote could come as early as Thursday.

The Interior Department official who oversees offshore oil and gas drilling for the Minerals Management Service will retire May 31, the Washington Post reports.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and birther queen Orly Taitz:

Justin Elliott explains how they came together without the universe exploding.

With people already starting to write (rightly or wrongly) Arlen Specter’s political epitaph, Christina Bellantoni looks at when the bigwigs realized Specter might be toast.

TPM Reader MM says it’s a crisis of legitimacy, a deep doubt in our core political institutions. I’ve tended to flip by the emails that say that all the pols are corrupt and govern by a system of institutionalized bribery and so forth. Not that that’s wrong necessarily. But what’s different about this election cycle. And most of these ‘we just want to throw the bums out’ emails don’t provide a satisfying explanation of why now. MM points to the pervasive after effects of the financial bailouts. Read More

Prolific neoconservative agitator Daniel Pipes has a new issue. Why are so many Muslim women winning beauty pageants?

Pipes, on the basis of seemingly no evidence at all, thinks this is an example of some sort of perverse affirmative action. But what strikes me as really odd about this is that what usually gets folks like Pipes most up in arms is the hijab — as a symbol of female subordination and anti-modernism, a point that has a lot to say for it. But most of these women Pipes now has a separate beef with are — like most beauty pageant winners — spending a decent amount of their time waltzing around with almost their whole bodies exposed (i.e., in bikinis). So the whole thing leaves me a bit confused. Strikes me as an example of rather successful Westernization.

Facts like this are what elections are won and lost on. Writing in National Journal, Ron Brownstein observes, “If the economy produces jobs over the next eight months at the same pace as it did over the past four months, the nation will have created more jobs in 2010 alone than it did over the entire eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency.”

There’s a lot riding on the “if” in Brownstein’s sentence, but as he goes on to write it’s actually a reasonably likely scenario that the economy will continue to produce jobs at the current rate. That doesn’t mean the unemployment rate will be at low levels by Election Day, or that the economy will have recovered. But from a political point of view, the perception that things are getting better can be more important to voters than whether things are good yet. And for Republicans that might make all the difference between a healthy gain of something like 20 seats in the House and a blowout win that gives them back the majority.

Scam Navy Vets charity gave big bucks to Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli.

We’ve gotten a lot of interesting responses to the call out below. And I’m going to publish more of them. But I wanted to start with this one from TPM Reader AH. The tone will strike some as elitist. And AH’s email doesn’t really get down to business until a few sentences in. But it strikes a chord with me and dovetails at least to some extent with the accelerating pace of political involvement over recent years. The gist is: has the accelerating pace of mass political involvement simply made our politics less stable? Read More

Down in the Florida Senate race, for a while it looked like Kendrick Meek was getting left behind in the dust by Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio in the senate candidate with major ethics scandal derby. But now it looks like Meek is definitely back in the game.